We woke up this morning to frozen pipes. It was inconvenient, but no big deal... just have to wait for things to thaw out until we can have water, right? Josh left for work, and I decided to stay home until the pipes became un-frozen and I could shower. So, I complained about the cold on my blog, and then I hopped on my bike trainer to kill some time. Thirty minutes later, I was changing the channel on the TV when I realized that I was hearing an odd noise in the background behind my trainer (the bike trainer is quite loud). And I also realized that Sienna was sitting precariously close to my spinning bike pedals, staring intently at me while looking very anxious and unhappy. I looked over my shoulder and saw water gushing out of the kitchen door into the dining room.
Oh, shit.
I call my landlord as soon as I can yank off my bike shoes, since I have no idea where the water main switch is. She doesn't know either, and has to call her mother on the other line to find out. When I run in the kitchen, water is spraying straight out from the wall under the sink. It's also spraying down on the floor and up at my waist. There's water everywhere. And it's cold. After a few minutes of running around through the house and leaving wet footprints everywhere and then running around outside on the freezing patio in my sports bra, bike shorts, and soaking wet socks, I finally managed to tear off the cover to the hot water heater and find the valve for the water. Great, so the water is off, but two rooms of the house now have a couple inches of standing water.
I managed to block the water from spreading into the living room and shoo the dogs outside, and then I just sort of stood and stared at the floor for a while. I don't have a squeegee. I already threw most of my bath towels on the floor in my initial panic while I was running around trying to turn off the water. I don't even have a mop (and no, the trusty Swiffer was not going to help me with this one). Oh, hey, maybe I should go around and unplug all of those cords in the outlet over there? And maybe I should move all that stuff off of the floor. Crap, I guess I have to roll up the soaked rug and move it outside too. Damn, the bag of dog food is getting all wet. Sigh.
I managed to get most of the furniture out into the backyard by myself, and finally got ahold of Josh who promised to come home from work and stop to pick up a mop on his way. I managed to get a decent bit of the water out of the house by the time Josh got home, and we were able to get most of the bigger puddles with the mop. A few fans and a bunch of open windows and doors eventually dried up everything, but it took a couple of hours. The entire backyard is now draped with soggy towels, and we could just about set up an entire dinner party with all of the furnishings and pieces sitting out there.
As it turns out, Josh was able to fix the pipe pretty easily himself. Our landlord had already set up a plumber to come by and fix things, but Josh had everything back to normal within a few minutes of getting home. Luckily, we didn't actually have a pipe burst, rather, a valve simply came free from the pipe it was attached to. Granted, I think I would rather deal with an outdoor pipe burst than any kind of indoor pipe separation, but I suppose it could have been much worse. Probably the luckiest part of this whole thing is that I had decided to stay home instead of going to work this morning. I don't even want to think about how bad this could have been if I hadn't been home. (Not to mention how traumatized and pissed off the dogs would have been!) And now that it is 2:30pm, I may finally be able to shower in my own bathroom with functioning pipes. Maybe. I don't want to jinx anything else.
I've been so worried about keeping the plants and citrus trees alive during this crappy weather that I hadn't even been thinking about the house itself. I've never had to deal with frozen pipes before, so this was a learning experience. The wood floors are going to need some TLC and a couple new coats of wax, but otherwise everything looks like it will be fine. Considering that we have a few more sub-freezing nights ahead of us, I'm going to be very careful to leave the faucets dripping overnight. And for you people waking up to frozen pipes: don't assume everything will thaw out and be fine if you leave and go to work!!
I live in the desert. This isn't supposed to happen. I'm ready for my 115 degree summer already.
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